This winter, we recognized some of the best photos and photographers in the Tahoe region through our Winter Photo Contest.

We are happy to announce the winner of the contest is Jeff Bender for the incredible photo below!

This photo was taken in the Upper Eagle Point Campground near Emerald Bay in November after an early snow storm. Jeff, who often snowshoes in this area, said, “I have been to this spot recently and the bench is totally covered in snow now. You would never know it’s there!” Jeff grew up in Southern California and spent every summer in Tahoe vacationing with his family. After a lifelong love of this special place, he now calls Tahoe home.

You can see all the photo entries in this video. Thank you to all participants! Special shout out to our other three finalists below.

Lake Tahoe charter service to donate funds for every hour in the air

The only local private aviation charter company in Lake Tahoe is joining forces with one of the region’s non-profit organizations to support projects that help lower and sequester carbon emissions. Mountain Lion Aviation will donate money for every hour flown to the Tahoe Fund. These funds will support environmental improvement projects in the Tahoe Basin. 

“We’re all locals. We all love living here and we all wanted to do something to help preserve this beautiful place we call home,” says Chris Barbera, CEO of Mountain Lion Aviation. “We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for our members and clients, and as a deep appreciation for them, and a love for our home, we decided to support the Tahoe Fund this way – the more we fly, the more we donate.”

The Tahoe Fund will use these donations to support projects in three key focus areas that are directly tied to carbon reduction: 

• Forest Health: Forest health projects reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire and its polluting emissions, and create a healthier forest better able to sequester carbon. 
• Transportation: More public transportation reduces vehicle miles traveled and carbon emissions.
• Wetlands Restoration: Restoring watersheds has a number of benefits in Lake Tahoe: improving lake clarity, reducing the prevalence of aquatic invasive species, mitigating fire and flood risk, increasing groundwater storage, strengthening habitat and ecological health, providing more opportunities for recreation, and critically, sequestering carbon. 

“It’s great to see a local business like Mountain Lion Aviation step up to make a difference,” said Tahoe Fund CEO Amy Berry. “Every hour they spend in the air will help us get more work done on the ground to improve the Lake Tahoe environment for all to enjoy.” 

Some of the projects that will benefit include: the Smartest Forest Fund, which supports innovative projects and new technology to improve forest health; TART Connect, which offers free, on-demand public transportation across the region; and the Greater Upper Truckee Watershed Restoration, the largest and most impaired watershed in the region. To learn more about the various programs funded by Tahoe Fund, visit: www.tahoefund.org

About Mountain Lion Aviation: Mountain Lion Aviation, an elite, personalized charter aircraft service and certified Cirrus Training Center, started in 2017 in Truckee, CA. Mountain Lion Aviation provides a multifaceted approach to current and future pilots along with servicing the communities’ mobility needs. The Mountain Lion Aviation experience allows people to get where they are going efficiently, effectively and safely. To learn more, please visit www.mountainlion.aero. To book personalized charter services or Cirrus flight training with the Mountain Lion team, please email info@mountainlion.aero or call at (530) 655-1100.

About the Tahoe Fund: The Tahoe Fund is a nonprofit founded in 2010 to support environmental improvement projects that restore lake clarity, enhance sustainable recreation, promote healthier forests, improve transportation and inspire greater stewardship of the region. Through the generous support of its donors, the Tahoe Fund has leveraged more than $10 million in private funds to secure more than $60 million in public funds for more than 80 environmental projects. The projects include new sections of the Lake Tahoe Bikeway, restoration of watersheds, removal of aquatic invasive species, forest health projects, new hiking trails, and stewardship programs. Learn more at www.tahoefund.org. 

Take Care Tahoe’s Adopt-A-Hydrant campaign promotes fire safety during major snowstorms

As a parade of winter storms continues to pummel the Tahoe region, Take Care Tahoe and local fire departments are promoting a campaign to encourage community members to keep fire hydrants clear of snow and debris in an effort to help fire personnel should an emergency occur. 

With over 4,000 fire hydrants in the Tahoe Basin, Take Care Tahoe asks community members to Adopt-A-Hydrant in their neighborhood by clearing a three foot radius on every side of the hydrant and to the road’s edge every time it snows.

Every year, wood stoves and fireplaces cause 54,000 structure fires across the country. During the winter months, the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District has reported they typically see an increase in household fires due to improper use of fireplaces and wood burning stoves, overdue maintenance, and animal nesting.

“As roads are cleared during and after winter storms, fire hydrants unintentionally get covered with snow,” said North Tahoe Fire Protection District Fire Marshal John James. “Between emergency responses, Fire District personnel work on clearing fire hydrants, but because of the increase in call volume that typically occurs during storm events, we need help with this effort. Community members willing to adopt the hydrant closest to their home or business and keep it clear of snow and debris are ultimately helping to keep our community safer.”

If the closest hydrant is buried or community members don’t know where it is, contact the nearest Fire District for GPS locations.

Find your local fire district and learn more about the Adopt-A-Hydrant program at takecaretahoe.org.

Voting is closed…stay tuned for our winner announcement!

Lake Tahoe is one of the most beautiful places on Earth, which naturally leads to a lot of incredible photographs! This winter, we recognized some of the best photos and photographers in the Tahoe region through our Winter Photo Contest.

To enter the contest, just tag us in your post on Instagram (@tahoefund) or Facebook (Tahoe Fund) or email info@tahoefund.org. Submissions were accepted through February 1st, and afterwards we will have a vote on our accounts so our followers can choose a winner. The theme of the contest was snow and winter, which wasn’t too hard to capture this January. 

Participants can enter multiple times, but only one entry per person will be included in the public vote. By entering, you are granting the Tahoe Fund permission to use your photo in our marketing and promotional materials (photo credit will always be given to the photographer). After entering on social media, the Tahoe Fund may ask you to send in the full resolution version of your image via email. If you have any questions, please email nshapiro@tahoefund.org.

Thank you for your participation!

New data estimates that we currently have a whopping 75 million trees in the Tahoe Basin, compared to only 2 million in the 1800s. The vast majority of these trees are competing with each other for resources, and hundreds of thousands have died in recent years. This is bad for forest health, but it also spells trouble when it comes to wildfire: Weak, dead and dying trees are extremely potent fuel for wildfire. In an overly-dense forest like Tahoe’s, they enable fire to travel fast, far and with great intensity.

At the Tahoe Fund’s annual Forest Health Briefing, sponsored by J.P. Morgan, experts highlighted what can be done to restore Tahoe’s forests to health and protect habitat, life and economy. On December 3, 2022, over 70 supporters and partners gathered at the West Shore Café to hear from presenters and panelists who are implementing innovative solutions to make our forests healthier and our community more resilient to wildfire. 

“We’re seeing a different type of fire now, largely due to overly-dense and unhealthy forests,” said Brian Estes, unit chief, Nevada-Yuba-Placer, California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection (CAL FIRE). “After the Caldor Fire found an avenue into the Lake Tahoe Basin, we saw a great need for proactive planning with our partners throughout the Basin to prioritize the protection of life and property in the face of devastating fires.”

One solution is Land Tender, a new software tool funded in part by the Tahoe Fund that uses high-resolution imagery and artificial intelligence to map and generate powerful analytics about our forests. This allows land managers and their community partners to plan targeted forest health projects with unprecedented specificity. Scott Conway, chief resilience officer of Vibrant Planet, the company that created this technology, demonstrated how Land Tender makes it easier for stakeholders to collaborate, while also significantly reducing the planning time for projects – in some cases, from years to months. 

“We are no longer doing random acts of restoration,” explained Conway. “We can take the dollars raised by private donors and public funding and put them in the right places to have the most significant impact for our forests and our community.”

Another critical aspect of forest restoration is having a place to take fuel – like downed, dead or excess trees – once it has been removed from the forest. Historically, there have been few options within the Tahoe region, which means contractors have had to truck the material – often 100 miles or more – to the nearest offtake site. Because there are so few to begin with, these sites are often full; or the cost of long-distance hauling can exceed the value of the timber itself. Luckily, things are changing with the opening of a new sawmill in Carson City. The mill, which sits on 40 acres of land owned by the Washoe Tribe, will be the first sawmill of its size to be built in the area in nearly a century. The Tahoe Fund has been working with the project leaders, Tahoe Forest Products LLC and the Washoe Development Corporation, an affiliate of Washoe Tribe of Nevada & California, to help bring this much needed resource to life. 

During the Forest Health Briefing, Kevin Leary, chairman of Tahoe Forest Products, shared that the mill will have a major impact on restoring forest health and preventing wildfire by creating a local market for both green and burned logs. The facility will process approximately 50 million board feet of lumber per year. It has already received 15 million board feet of hazard trees from Sierra at Tahoe that were burned in the 2021 Caldor Fire.

Leary also emphasized that many different groups have a role to play in forest health, from policymakers to private funders. “Forest health requires a holistic approach that spans industries,” said Leary.

Having a skilled forestry workforce is another key piece of solving forest health challenges, said Erick Walker, Forest Supervisor, U.S. Forest Service, Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. “We’re up against a labor shortage,” said Walker. “We know what needs to be done to get our forests to function and look like they once did, but we need skilled people to do this work.” 

The Tahoe Fund recently awarded scholarships to every student in Lake Tahoe Community College’s new forestry program to enable more young people to choose a career in this critically understaffed field. The new program is teaching students how to conduct forest management work, from planning to implementation.Graduates will be qualified for jobs with CAL FIRE, the US Forest Service, the California Tahoe Conservancy, the Tahoe Resource Conservation District, and other agencies that are part of the Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team.

Collaboration among these agencies is key to scaling these efforts, which is the goal of the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force, according to its director, Patrick Wright. Wright also discussed the need for sustained government funding: “Trying to treat a million acres of forest annually requires $1-2 billion a year,” said Wright. “While there’s a budget surplus now, we need this level of funding every year to move away from small scale projects and go big.” 

There’s also a critical role for individual donors and the private sector to play. Often, there’s a need to close funding gaps in order to leverage public dollars. For example, the Tahoe Fund’s $50,000 investment of private funding in Land Tender helped secure $500,000 in state funding.  We’ve seen that when we support innovative ideas – like Land Tender and the new sawmill – game-changing solutions come to life. 

“If we can successfully bring the private sector and nonprofits into partnership with land management agencies to implement these projects, we can move at a pace and scale that will actually make a difference,” said Ryan Shane, Deputy Administrator, Nevada Division of Forestry. “You can make magic happen if you are willing to invest in these innovative solutions.”

Learn more about the Tahoe Fund’s forest health initiatives and get involved today: www.tahoefund.org/smartestforest. 

A special thank you to our Forest Briefing sponsor, J.P. Morgan, for making this event possible.